Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  The wolf blinked slowly, then began to walk toward him. Euan slashed before him with the blade, warding off the vision. But without making a sound upon the autumn leaves, the creature continued until it stood so near him he could see the black splinters in its honey-colored irises.

  “As real as you,” it said, without moving its mouth. The voice ricocheted only inside Euan’s own head. “Answer me this: Did the life you stole make you happy?”

  “Get back!” Euan screamed, and hacked at the wolf, who sidestepped his amateur thrusts with ease before returning like a lost dog.

  “Do the murders of young women and of all my fellow creatures make you feel less afraid?” Its head was lowered now, and the bristles stood out from its body as if it had been struck by lighting. Fangs the size of human fingers appeared as it curled its lips.

  “I beg forgiveness,” said Euan, though he didn’t mean it in his heart, “for all my sins.”

  “You will pay for every life you took,” said the wolf, as it charged Euan and pushed him onto his back. The second before he felt its teeth closing around his throat, Euan heard the voice inside his head saying, “I promise you that you will know fear. You will learn what it is like to roam the countryside and be despised, hunted, and murdered for sport. But just remember this: The only way to get your old life back is to make someone love you despite their hatred of you, and sacrifice yourself for them. But also consider this: What if you no longer remember what it was like before?” It glared right through Euan’s outer defenses and glanced straight into his darkest desires. “You may see me again,” said the wolf. “You may not. It is up to you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  If wolves have the capacity to smile, this one nearly did. It turned its head coyly. “You’ll see. In time.”

  “How long . . . will that take?” gasped Euan, unable to breathe.

  The animal’s eyes bored through him like the torch he’d carried the night he murdered his brother.

  “Only God and fortune know,” it said, and bit harder.

  Euan passed out as the pain in his throat overwhelmed him.

  When he woke up, he thought he was in heaven.

  Skylarks twittered, and the sun made his face burn hot. A terrible dream still lingered in his head, in which a wolf had ripped out his throat, but it quickly faded. Very carefully, he opened his eyes and saw that he was still in the forest, where night had turned to day. Leaves rustled somehow louder in the breeze. The smell of freshly harvested grain burned in his nostrils more than it had before, and before he could reflect on why, another scent almost made him faint. It was the smell of a freshly killed deer somewhere nearby, its salty juices both sweet and pungent in the gathering heat. He felt that peculiar blood song in his ears that he’d only experienced once before, when stomping his brother, that sweet quickening just before the kill.

  “There he is!” someone shouted nearby. “Over here!”

  “Thank God,” Euan said, because he recognized his most merciless hunter by the sound of his voice. “I’ve prayed that—”

  He stopped, because his own mouth didn’t make the sounds it should have. All he heard was a nonsensical kind of gargling. Then he remembered the bite on his neck; knew his vocal cords were probably damaged. He rose. Before he could wave to his own hunting party, an arrow spiked the tree right next to him, and he flinched.

  “Padraic, it’s me, don’t!” he tried to shout in anger, but he couldn’t get the words out as a rider in black leather skins charged straight at him, brandishing a mallet. Euan ran as he’d never run in his short life. God, his heart beat in his chest as if it had grown to three times its regular size. He sprinted past crags of rock and over hedges with an ease he could only have dreamed of as a boy, feeling his muscles quiver with a spasm that sent him nearly flying. And when he finally allowed himself to rest, he discovered that he’d come to a brook where not a breath of wind stirred. Euan bent down to get a drink of water.

  And he heard his own broken throat growling in horror at the sight.

  A wolf stared back at him from the still surface.

  He looked down at himself and saw thick fur and paws where his hands should have been. Euan closed his eyes and shook his head. He had to still be dreaming. He opened his eyes again, leaned all the way down to the water this time, and felt his black snout touch the cold stream. He could smell the salmon and frogs that had died in it, and instantly sensed that it was fresher just a few feet upstream. There was dead Welsh blood in it, too, its stink blending with rotting branches. He withdrew his whiskered face and sat there, panting, looking at his skin, which had become gray fur. His body was large and muscular now, and only a little of his own wound had encrusted itself where the wolf from the forest had bit him earlier. Against his own better judgment, he had to admire himself. No longer was he the scrawny twin people laughed at behind his back, despite his father’s crown. What power! Such strength! He could only have dreamed—

  “This way!” cheered another of his most ardent wolf killers a few hedgerows behind him, and he heard the horses’ hooves like an explosion.

  Euan ran again and didn’t stop until the heavens had grown black and its diamond carpet had been unfurled, blinding him with its brilliance. Was that Ursa Minor up there? What was the beaded string of twinkly lights next to it? He wondered if his brother was looking down on him from the stars or if he could even recognize him now. But the images in his mind of Ned teaching him long ago about “God’s shiny eyes” were wiped clean by his hungry new blood. It didn’t matter to a wolf what the constellations signified; the absence of a moon now only meant the hunters wouldn’t find him so easily. He turned his head and listened. Something moving in the grass. Easy prey.

  That same night, he feasted on a rabbit he’d caught, eating it in three bites while it still squirmed in his grip. As the flesh went down, he felt a new, hungry rhythm briefly silencing all other sounds around him. He finally curled up underneath a tree, wet and tired of running. Euan’s paws were swollen and hurt. His last memories of a life in silks, between women’s legs, and in the Great Hall, where hundreds of stuffed wolf heads stared balefully down at him drifted slowly away and were replaced by a desire to survive, no matter how.

  The wolf in him rejoiced at having been turned into this exquisite predator.

  Whatever remained in him that was still human felt nothing but childish fear.

  He lay for a while by the brook, listening to the trees’ creaking voices and sensing the heartbeat of every doe, rat, and owl as far into the woods as his new eyes could see. The transformation was complete. The wolf’s curse hung all about him, like incense, its warning still echoing inside his head. He felt the pressure building between his ears and opened his jaws.

  Without having to think about it, he threw back his head and howled.

  I can still see Jim sitting there on his stool, lapping up the applause, the bastard.

  “So endeth the first part of my tale,” he said, like a practiced seanchaí, calmly as you please, while everyone from hard-bitten trawlermen and Paris Hilton–wannabe girlies still in their training bras put their hands together for him. He nodded and was about to walk down into the crowd when a voice piped up.

  “So what happens to Euan? Will he be a wolf forever?”

  I turned and looked. It wasn’t hard to locate the source of that flirty little query. Sarah McDonnell had walked right up to him, wearing her best come-hither outfit, the one where being able to see the color of one’s knickers is practically standard when picking out a pair of low-slung jeans and a black shirt that ends just at the lowest edge of your tits. She wore shoes with fake diamond sparkles on them. She looked out from under her blue-tinted eyelids and smiled at him. I’d seen her practicing that look in front of a pocket mirror down at the bank, when she thought no customers noticed. She was no more than twenty then, pretty as a spring morning and dumb as a bag of hair. Her earrings looked like she’d stolen them from the wall decoration in an Ind
ian restaurant.

  All right, perhaps she wasn’t that bad, and it’s petty of me to speak ill of the dead. Our Lady, forgive me. But if a girl can’t be allowed to feel a pinch of jealousy, even as she’s rushing to tell you this while probably not long for this world herself, then when, I ask you?

  Anyway, Jim didn’t care for her pushiness and answered both her and the rest of the crowd at once. He turned the charm down like a dimmer switch on a lamp and left Sarah in the dark while illuminating the rest of us. “All true and honest tales have a beginning, a middle, and an end, so have patience,” he said, which made the girlie in the acid-washed jeans wrinkle her brow. It had been a simple enough question. She’d probably never had a man tell her no, either, especially not when flashing her skin at him dressed up like an eejit.

  “You may find me in one of the towns nearby over the next few days,” he continued, motioning his hand in the direction of the Asian gentleman by the bar. “Tomo over there is my . . . I suppose you might call him a road manager, isn’t that right? The trusty compass needle around which my humble life revolves, eh, Tomo?”

  Tomo half turned and smiled without much conviction. What I thought was a denim jacket earlier was now clearly an oilskin coat, the kind with millions of pockets for fishing tackle and such. All the pockets were weighted down with something. The garment was the color of a winter bog. His eyes were telling Jim to put a sock in it and get the hell out, for whatever reason. I remember noticing him glaring at me, too. But I didn’t think about it then. When he realized how many local eyes were on his fourth-world-looking face, he performed an exaggerated bow and threw out his arm like a drunken ballet dancer.

  “True enough, ladies, gentlemen, and any boy or girl brave enough to hear the next part of the tale,” Tomo said, in a voice so nearly childlike in its softness that it startled me. There wasn’t any no-tickee-no-shirtee Chinaman humbug with this fella. He could have come from slap bang in the middle of Castletownbere by the sound of him, even if his showman delivery was a discount version of Jim’s. Tomo was probably no more than twenty-five, but he looked ancient, as if strong drink and cigarettes had pulled fluid from his sallow cheeks since he was ten. “There is no telling exactly where we shall be, but rumor has it that the good town of Adrigole might repay a visit two nights from today. At the Auld Swords Inn. So come one, come all. And tell a friend who likes a good scare.”

  Tomo put his hand over an old gray felt hat and scooped it onto his head. I could hear change hitting his head inside. Children laughed. Then he sent Jim another penetrating look and bowed.

  “Well said, old friend Tomo,” crowed Jim, downing his lukewarm pint. “Thank you. And with that ringing endorsement, fair ladies and honest gentlemen, we bid you adieu.”

  I felt myself rising from my chair before I quite knew what I had done.

  Jim had been following his manager out the door when he turned and looked at me. You could have burnt your fingers on Sarah McDonnell’s head just then, she was so hopping mad. Jim whispered something into Tomo’s ear, and the Japanese Irishman looked like he’d just been slapped across the mouth. He hissed something back at Jim, who stopped him with just one hand gesture. Moments later, as Jim came strolling over to me, Tomo walked slowly out the door with a face like a trout someone pulled ashore and left to rot.

  “Are there two of you, or are you just everywhere in town?” he asked me, sitting down right next to us without being asked. Róisín rolled her eyes before I could kick her leg, but Aoife carelessly drank in whatever sex-and-leather combination his face radiated out into the room so thickly even dogs outside stirred. She started fussing with her nails, which I’d never seen her do that obviously before, with a man present.

  “Could be more of me waiting outside, you just never can tell,” I shot back, right proud of myself. “Are you here for the guzzle, like, or is your day job still to deport Swedes?”

  He just grinned.

  Róisín said, “The hell you talking about, anyway?”

  “A private joke, miss,” said Jim, not looking at anyone but me in that way he’d done earlier. Before I had even touched his hand, I knew I’d be cheating on Finbar more than once that same night and felt nearly awful. My sisters started to get up and grab their bags, as if I’d sent them a get-lost telegram. Aoife winked. Rosie drank both our pints in two shotgun swallows and tousled my hair before leaving.

  Those syrup-colored eyes now rested only on me.

  “So, how Quick are ya?” I asked, but that was just to watch his pupils move. I knew well enough.

  And come the morning bell, the sphinx would have to handle my little sixth-class monsters all by himself.

  NEED I TELL you more about that night?

  Well, I suppose I do, if you can’t guess for yer own self. So let’s get it out of the way. But if you imagine that he had me arse over teacups and begging for it before I’d even got my knickers off, you’re wrong, and get yer mind out of the gutter, besides. Because this was different: What Jim did better than anybody was listen to what you needed and then hold out until finally giving it seemed almost predestined.

  We were in my kitchen, and I was making two strong mugs of Bewley’s with milk before I even asked him if he wanted tea. And while I prattled on about Rosie’s radio obsession, and how Aoife probably thought she was Robert fucking De Niro himself in Taxi Driver, he didn’t say much at first. He looked around for something, like he was expecting company. So as I stole glances at myself in the windowpane’s reflection to check my hair, I told him about our Aunt Moira, and her newfound love for early Catholic home decoration. I may even have made a joke about it, I don’t remember.

  What I do recall is that he first touched me on the neck.

  It was a light brush, nothing more, before he moved past me to get comfortable in my place. Had it happened now, I would probably recognize the signs of someone marking his territory before pouncing. Back then, I just thought he was cool for not immediately throwing me up against a wall and fumbling with his zipper, like Finbar had done the first time we’d gone out to dinner together. Jim stopped by my figurines and smiled. I blushed. There were a lot of them, you see. Totems of places I wanted to visit some day when I got the hell out of town, but knew I never would.

  The Statue of Liberty with fake green patina, the Colosseum, and even the shagging Eiffel Tower stood on the windowsill next to a brass hurling trophy my father had won as a boy. It featured him wielding a hurley above his head, like an old Celtic warrior might have. At least, that’s what he had always said. Nearby, postcards of Mallorca hung on my fridge, and photo snaps of me and my sisters wearing lobsterlike first-degree burns, with dodgy cocktails and cigarettes somewhere in the vicinity. I’m afraid to admit there were pictures of old Tutankhamun about as well, just for good measure. When Jim smiled, I noticed how white his teeth were. He still hadn’t kissed me, and I was beginning to get second thoughts. Finbar had already texted me three times without getting an answer.

  “So where are the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?” Jim wanted to know. “You’re missing those.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Ah, I forgot. Think they don’t water them anymore, besides.”

  He sat back down next to me at the kitchen table. He smelled like motor oil and the stout still on his breath. “What’s your name?”

  I heard myself saying “Fiona” right before he kissed me.

  I’ve told you before how I felt both naked and safe when he really looked at me in the street earlier that day. Multiply that by infinity. He took his time getting my clothes off and wouldn’t let me do it myself. His teeth grinned above and next to me as he unzipped my skirt, removed my blouse and T-shirt, and unlaced each of my admittedly very unsexy shoes, while gently slapping my hands away when I tried to help. Through it all, I just lay there and wondered how many times he’d done that, because there was a practiced fluidity to his movements, a ritual, almost. I wouldn’t have minded even if I knew the answer, and that’s the truth.

&nbs
p; Because he shagged me good and proper and in every possible corner of my tiny flat. What surprised me is that he let me lead him, rather than acting like the hard-core sex desperado I had imagined him to be. And where Finbar had needed a map to get anywhere near my most tender places without losing his way, Jim could read my desires with his eyes closed, tracing my breathing and the way I’d flinch when he touched me inside, and didn’t stop even when he knew he had reached a way station we both liked. It felt like I danced some furious Cuban number with him, standing, sitting, and lying down, while I ventured into new areas he knew intimately but wanted me to discover without being led by the nose.

  Even as I was being shagged out of all proportion, this wasn’t just physical; I knew that much.

  He was seducing every bit of me I could name, and then some. And I gave up all of it willingly. Of course I’d had boyfriends before Finbar. And naturally some of them had been sweet and kind, or even experienced enough with their hands and tongues to make me blush. But Jim wasn’t just interested in proving his manhood and coming in record time, and in the loudest way possible, the way most every man I’d ever known had been. He was unpredictable, which both irritated me and turned me on. This one’s passion lay deeper, buried underneath all that skill and refinement, just barely out of reach. It was that elusiveness, I think, that had me aching for it again each time we’d finished. He had all of me, and I still only tasted a smidgen of what he kept inside. Now that I think about it, it was probably just as well, since that sliver made me higher than a kite. The full dose might have killed me.

  It must have been five hours later or so that I could even think straight again.

  I was lying on the floor with my cheek resting on Jim’s perfectly smooth, hairless chest and dreaming of a cigarette I didn’t have. He read my mind again and reached over to his jacket, digging around for two ciggies. We didn’t move for a while, but watched the smoke rings disintegrate as the seagulls’ cawing outside informed us it would be dawn soon.